Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  Though Hiroshi wasn’t unpopular at school—despite his outstandingly good grades—he didn’t make any close friends either and was only rarely invited to weekend parties. As for girlfriends, Hiroshi may well have been the one boy in school who was less interested in the girls than they were in him. He hardly looked at them.

  Even before high school had begun, Hiroshi had felt less and less happy about his room at home. In the end, he asked his father’s permission to take a few things out.

  “Do what you like,” Dad said right away. “It’s your room.”

  So Hiroshi took down all the photos, put the sports gear, complete with the shelf, down into the cellar, and got to work scraping away the floral wallpaper. His father helped him, and then they repapered the whole room with a simple design and painted it over in white. His father asked him why he liked it better that way.

  “I don’t know,” Hiroshi admitted, thinking it over. “I think I’m just not as American as the room was before.”

  His father needed no further encouragement to teach him everything he knew about Japanese culture. Hiroshi was amazed to learn more about Japan from his American father than he ever had in all his years at school in Tokyo.

  One day Hiroshi mentioned to his father that another student had teased him he would likely commit hara-kiri if he ever flunked a test, and his father replied that hara-kiri wasn’t even a word the Japanese traditionally used. It had been invented by the British, he explained, who had just translated the term “belly cut” and meant it as an insult. It was a way of disparaging the ritual suicide of a samurai.

  “The correct word is seppuku,” he said. “A samurai who had lost face by neglecting his duties could restore his family honor by committing seppuku correctly.”

  He fetched down some books and catalogs from the shelves and showed Hiroshi what the tantō looked like, a slightly curved dagger with one sharp edge, about a foot long, and showed him how it was different from the wakizashi, a short sword about twice that length. That was the dagger that would have been used for the seppuku ritual, he told his son. “The warrior would wear a white kimono as a sign of purity and would write a death poem before he carried out the ritual. They called a poem like that jisei no ku.”

  Hiroshi was simultaneously fascinated and horrified as he listened to his father’s explanation. It was strange that his dad was the one to explain all this to him. Sure, he had heard something about it at school in Tokyo, but only ever as a subject for dumb jokes.

  “Then he sits seiza—you know what that means, right?”

  Hiroshi nodded. “Sure. It’s just the normal way of sitting on the floor.”

  “Well yes. Normal in Japan. We Westerners think that sitting on a chair is normal.” They both sat down on the floor, the soles of their feet tucked underneath them, toes touching. “Then the man bares his torso. He takes up the knife and stabs it into what they called the scarlet field, the tanden. It’s about two inches under the navel and it’s supposed to be the center of the human body, the place where the soul resides. He cuts his belly left to right, with one final cut upward so that the organs tumble out. What generally happens is it cuts through a major blood vessel, the abdominal aorta, which causes his blood pressure to drop right away, and he loses consciousness pretty quick. That’s important, because the most important thing for correct seppuku is that the samurai mustn’t flinch or groan, not even let the pain show on his face. He mustn’t show any fear either, of course. You mustn’t be able to see any sign of pain on the dead man or it doesn’t count as seppuku.”

  Hiroshi pondered all this. “Sounds to me like a hell of a mess.”

  His dad smiled at that. “You could certainly say that. If the seppuku was performed inside a building—which didn’t usually happen—they used special tatami mats with white braid. They had to be thrown away afterward, of course.”

  They had agreed from the start that Hiroshi would fly back to Tokyo once a year to visit his mother, who had by this time taken the job in Inamoto’s office. She looked after the Australian side of his business, supplying Japanese groceries to the stores there. Inamoto didn’t curse quite so much as he once had—he was getting old, Mother declared—but he still paid her next to nothing. Hiroshi’s mother didn’t much care about that, since she didn’t need the money. By the look of it there was no new man in her life. She had women friends, though, and now and then they would all go on little trips together, and once a week they met to play cards or renju.

  It was strange for Hiroshi to come back to Tokyo and realize he now felt more at home in Alexandria than he did here. The streets and alleys in the neighborhood seemed to have grown even narrower, and in the tiny apartments he felt like a rooster crammed into a too-small hutch. But it was a son’s duty to visit his mother, so he did.

  During his senior year at high school, Aunt Kumiko died. Hiroshi flew back to Japan two months earlier than usual, not to Tokyo but directly to Minamata for the funeral. After the ceremony everyone agreed it had been a merciful release for Aunt Kumiko. Even Dr. Suzuki said as much.

  “You don’t have to visit me just out of a sense of duty,” his mother said before he flew back. “Children leave sooner or later; that’s just the way it is. It’s enough if you call from time to time or write me a letter so that I know how you are. Come back when you feel you really need to.”

  “Okay,” said Hiroshi.

  It was to be his last visit for many years.

  When he got back to Alexandria, an envelope bearing the crest of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was waiting for him. The typewritten letter inside said the admissions office had considered his application and granted him a spot.

  THE ISLE OF THE BLESSED

  1

  “What am I supposed to do there?” Hiroshi asked.

  Rodney flung up his hands. “What you do at a party! Have fun. Meet people. Have a good time.”

  “I meet people every day. And I have fun, too.” Hiroshi peered at the computer screen. “Most of the time.” Except, for instance, when boring stuff got in the way, like this totally lame assignment paper on a totally dumb topic.

  “It’s the party of parties. It’s the event of the year. It’s the inauguration of the new Phi Beta Kappa frat house. You just gotta be there.”

  “Who says I gotta?” Hiroshi muttered, irritated. Outside the window an enormous garbage truck was trying to turn around, but the parking lot was chock-full of cars as always. It had been maneuvering for about ten minutes, a few centimeters this way, and then a few centimeters back again.

  Maybe, Hiroshi reflected, he should have been thinking inch by inch. But he didn’t want to have anything more to do with those antiquated American units than he needed to for everyday life.

  “They say there’s gonna be a whole load of VIPs there, famous Phi Beta Kappa brothers,” Rodney said, resuming his argument. “President Bush, President Clinton…”

  “Wow,” said Hiroshi, audibly unimpressed.

  “In any case, we’ve got to get tickets now before they’re gone.”

  “You need tickets? What kind of crazy party is this?”

  The garbage truck had backed into a tree, one of the long-suffering birches that stood along the sidewalk. A faint smell of garbage began to drift in through the open window. A man climbed out of the passenger seat to guide the driver.

  Rodney sat down on the desk so that Hiroshi had to look at him. “Just listen, man. You’re young, I’m young, we’re in college, for crying out loud. When we’re a pair of old crocks, we’ll look back on these days with tears in our eyes. And going to a party now and then is all part of the deal, you get me? Goofing off. Smoking a joint while the girls hold their titties under your nose…”

  Hiroshi peered past his roommate. The garbage guy down there was beginning to sweat.

  All caught up in his talk of the party, Rodney was getting worked up, too
. “I’m not saying you’ve gotta get so drunk you wake up in the gutter the next day,” he conceded. “Or next to some girl you’ve never seen before in your life, or some guy, God forbid…you don’t have to go smashing things, crashing cars, or whatever. You’ve just gotta come along and have a good time for once.”

  Those guys down in the parking lot weren’t going to make it. If they had any eye for geometry, they would have realized what they were trying to do was flat-out impossible, since someone had come along after they arrived and parked in the worst possible place.

  “Speaking of cars, you should go down there,” Hiroshi said, pointing out the window. “Stop them from smashing into yours. You blocked them in.”

  “Oh shit!” Rodney raced off like greased lightning, and Hiroshi turned back to the totally lame assignment paper and its totally dumb topic.

  The assignment was about the effects of robots on automated production processes, with a view to its effect on social systems. Hiroshi knew clear as day what kind of arguments Prof. DeLouche wanted to read: that robots took away people’s jobs, and the companies who used them should have to contribute to the social safety net in return. And since he was so sure that was what the prof wanted, Hiroshi set out to argue exactly the opposite. Robots damn well should take away people’s jobs. That’s what they were invented for, that’s what they were built for, and using them for that purpose was socially beneficial in itself. Think, for instance, of a worker who spends eight hours a day feeding sheet metal into a hydraulic press, the same repetitive motion hour after hour, bored beyond words and in constant danger of having his hands crushed. Nobody had the right to tell him his quality of life would be lessened if a robot did the work instead. A robot could repeat the motion twenty-four hours a day and never get bored, never make a mistake. Of course, Hiroshi would raise hackles with that, but he was well accustomed to that.

  He watched Rodney talking with the garbage guys, waving his hands, obviously making a joke, since they laughed instead of getting sore at him. Rodney could do that sort of thing, could win people over. Hiroshi would never understand how he managed to do that.

  They had met at orientation. As freshmen, the two of them had started off sharing a room in Baker House, where everybody was crazy for architecture and design, and traditions were meticulously observed. One of these was to throw a piano from the roof every year, toward the end of April. They had agreed this was not their kind of thing, and when the chance came up the following year to get neighboring singles in MacGregor House, they had grabbed it. The rooms didn’t have breathtaking views over the Charles River the way the brochures always showed; instead, they faced Briggs Field, a rather unprepossessing sports field behind the dorms that lined the riverbank. Hiroshi’s room looked onto nothing grander than the parking lot and the access way.

  Hiroshi could live with that, though, since when he was occupied with a problem, he shut out the world around him entirely. And he was often occupied.

  “Okay, so really,” said Rodney, picking up where he had left off just as soon as he came back into the room, “we don’t even need to discuss it. I absolutely have to go to this party, and you would be a real buddy if you came with me.” He grinned, baring his teeth. “Look at it like an offer you can’t refuse.”

  Hiroshi leaned back, rubbing the bridge of his nose with the palms of both hands. “Which brings me right back to my original question: What am I supposed to do there? You expect me to turn into some sort of party animal? If that’s what you expect, you’re dreaming.”

  “I can tell you what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to introduce me to Prof. Bernstein.”

  Hiroshi blinked. “This is getting weirder. First we have to buy tickets, then there are going to be professors there. Are you sure this is even a party?”

  Rodney’s expression softened into one of infinite patience and understanding. “That’s how these parties work. First, the older brothers sit around all civilized in their jackets and ties, and they have fireside chats on academic topics and all that stuff. Then, when the old guys get up and leave, the fun starts.”

  “That’s when everybody flips out, you mean. And who in the world is Prof. Bernstein?”

  Rodney counted off on his fingers. “First, he’s professor of mathematics at Harvard, and I happen to know that he was very taken by your paper on automaton theory.”

  Hiroshi shrugged, unimpressed. “And?”

  “Second, he’s the brother of Dr. Rachel Warden.” Dr. Warden was teaching a requirement course for Rodney’s major, and he had to write a term paper for her.

  “And third?”

  “Third, he’s a dyed-in-the-wool Star Trek fan.”

  Hiroshi finally understood. He rolled his eyes and shoved off from the desk with both hands, scooting halfway across the room on his chair. “Rod!” he yelled. “Not again! When are you going to understand that they will never in your life let you—”

  “Why not?” Rodney interrupted, stung. “The Drake equation clearly shows there has to be intelligent life out there somewhere, so—”

  “The Drake equation!” Hiroshi shook his head. “It doesn’t prove a thing. Not one single variable in the whole equation is even close to being defined. You can use that equation to calculate a universe that’s empty or bursting at the seams.”

  “Yes, I know. By the way, it would be great if you could think up some new counterarguments sometime. I might actually get somewhere.”

  “If I think of something, you’ll be the first to know. Honest Injun.”

  Rodney began to pace up and down the room as though he were in the lecture hall discussing the matter with at least half a dozen Nobel Prize winners. “Nevertheless, if you set the variables for the Drake equation anywhere but at the very lowest limits, then we are forced to conclude a great many alien species out there are about as intelligent as humankind. Which raises the question—”

  “Of why we can’t even catch an alien TV signal. I know.” Hiroshi nodded. This was Rodney’s favorite topic—and that was being kind, since it could equally be called his obsession: why, if there was intelligent life out in the universe, nobody on Earth had ever detected it.

  “Exactly. And Star Trek offers what you might call a popular, accessible literary metaphor here, with that famous Prime Directive that bans interference in the affairs of other species. The argument would be that we’re under some kind of quarantine, because we’re not yet a fully developed civilization, which is logical enough, since compared with any technological civilization that came to find us via interstellar space travel, we couldn’t be. So they’re protecting us. They’re a more developed civilization, technically and ethically, and they don’t want us to be overwhelmed.”

  “That’s not proof, that’s tautology. It’s pretty near the textbook definition of a fallacy from any seminar in logic.”

  Rodney made a face. “Hey, I’m not looking to win the Nobel Prize here. I just think it might be fun to write my master’s thesis about it, okay?”

  Hiroshi crossed his arms. “Right, let me just sum up to make sure that I’ve understood it right. You want me to introduce you to this Prof. Bernstein—”

  “No, no. I want to introduce you to him. Then you talk to him awhile, let the guy tell you how good your paper was, and so on, and then you bring me back into the conversation.”

  “And I tell him you want to write a thesis in astronomy on the Starfleet Prime Directive. And then you think he’ll get so carried away by the idea that he’ll threaten never to speak to his sister again if she doesn’t let you.”

  “Something like that.”

  “You are completely out of your mind.”

  “You’re the one who should know.”

  Hiroshi folded his hands across his stomach, then sighed and said with resignation, “All right then. What do I care? Let’s go to this party.”

  Rodney’s grin spr
ead across his entire face. “You’re always a tough nut to crack.”

  “And a good thing, too,” Hiroshi replied, rolling his chair back to the desk.

  As he left, Rodney asked, “Should I get a ticket for Dorothy? She called you this morning by the way, something about taking a trip.”

  “I know.” Hiroshi massaged his temples and tried to remember some argument about the totally lame assignment on the totally dumb topic that had flashed through his head while they were talking. “She left me a message on the answering machine just before you came in.”

  “And? Three tickets?”

  Hiroshi turned in his chair. “Is this the kind of party where it’s a good idea to take your girlfriend along?”

  “To tell you the truth,” Rodney said with a grin, “it’s not.”

  “Then get two tickets.”

  James Michael Bennett III saw the ball go out, throwing up a cloud of red dust on the other side of the white line. Everybody saw it but the umpire, who would brook no discussion. And with that the match was decided. They had lost.

  “This is bullshit,” Todd said in disgust. He was Bennett’s partner, and he was on the verge of smashing his racket on the ground in frustration. “The guy must be going blind!”

  “You can say that again,” Bennett agreed, “but not until we’re off the court.”

  “JB, that ball was out. If he had seen it and called it, we could have swung the game back.”

  Bennett wiped the sweat from his forehead. “But he didn’t call it. And the umpire’s decision is final; that’s the rules.”

  Todd snorted. He was so red in the face it looked like he might burst at any moment. “JB, your dad counts for something in this club. Can’t you make them fire the umpire?”

  Bennett looked him straight in the eye. “Todd, those are the rules. If you don’t want to play by the rules, then don’t play. What’s winning worth if you don’t win by the rules? Nothing.”